Surely you have ever seen classic cars with black and white or even completely white tires. On the other hand, have you ever wondered why we link the color black to the tires? Behind this issue is a historical landmark from the Taylorist era that the automobile industry has preserved as a tradition to this day.
Carriage manufacturers began to cover the wheels with rubber around the 19th century to increase their ergonomics and make them quieter. The predecessors of tires were obtained from a mixture of rubber and sulfur subjected to high pressures and temperatures. This process resulted in white rubber, faithful to the color of the rubber, which gave the wheels greater resistance. Even the Ford team implemented them in their first models more than a century ago.
The advance of the Second Industrial Revolution already at the dawn of the 20th century, led to the emergence of new needs, both for users and for automobile manufacturers. Drivers used to complain that the white wheels got dirty easily and were very difficult to clean. This aesthetic problem led the manufacturer BF Goodrich to patent in 1910 the modern tire as we know it today.
Petroleum and its derivative products played a crucial role in the ideation of the new rubber. The black color then impregnated the mixture with the rubber, despite making up only 30% of the composition of the tire. With this invention, consumers not only slammed dirt problems, but companies realized that it gave the wheel greater grip and made it more durable.
Some manufacturers, reluctant to produce all-black tires due to the high cost of oil, adopted an inexpensive solution that saved the dirt problem at the same time. In this way, two-tone tires were born, which kept the white color of the rubber on the walls of the tire and reserved the black color for the part of the tread, which is the most exposed to stains. These elegant models survived for some time and are a hallmark of automobiles from the 1950s and 1960s.
In the same way, the tire industry currently retains the color black despite the possibilities that exist to manufacture them in other colors. The main reason for this is that making them with the necessary raw material, smoky quartz, would considerably increase production costs.
